Huawei P8 Smartphone Release Date, Specs, Price, and News

Apr 15, 2015 02:27 PM EDT

In the world of smartphones, Huawei is an international competitor who releases several great smartphone handsets per year.  Thanks to the power of Livestream, we know that the company is going to release their newest flagship Android smartphone with the Huawei P8, and this is what we know about the Release Date, Specs, and News.   

Phone Arena reports that Huawei has unveiled its newest flagship Android phone for 2015 with the Huawei P8.  This is the beginning of a new series for Huawei, and the P8 has a very slim look with a 5.2 inch screen (with 1080 x 1920 resolution) and a thickness of merely 6.4 mm. 

The Huawei P8 is a dual-SIM phone with 4G connectivity supported on both SIM cards.  The system chip is a HiSilicon Kirin 930 chip with octa-core CPU with 3 GB of RAM and internal storage of 16 GB.  The 16 GB is the regular model, and it also comes with a "premium" one with 64 GB.  The main camera is a 13 Megapixel job with OIS, RBGW sensor, and f/2.0 lens, with the front-facing camera at 8 Megapixels.  If you are not familiar with what a RBGW (red-green-blue-white) sensor is, it is "the world's first four-color RGBW sensor" that can bring brightness up by 32 percent in high-contrast lighting scenes, and reduce it by 78 percent in low-light environments. 

Of course, the Huawei P8 will come with Android 5.0 Lollipop operating system right out of the box, there are some bonus features with this.  A refreshed EMUI 3.1 custom user interface by Huawei allows the user support of "knuckle gestures", meaning that you can use a knuckle instead of just your finger.  For example, a double tap with a knuckle can capture a screenshot, and drawing with a knuckle can crop out screenshots.  This could easily become a feature on a lot of other smartphones. 

In addition to the slim design, one bold aesthetic choice is the all-metal unibody that comes in four colors:  mystic champagne, prestige gold, titanium gray, and carbon black.   By the way, the phone might not be waterproof, but it has a nano-coating that makes it spill-resistant. 

The Huawei P8 will have a release date of sometime in Europe in May 2015 with a starting price of 499 euros ($530) off contract, with the premium edition for 599 euros. 

These prices are lower than the competitors at Samsung or Apple.  There might be some readers who have never heard of Huawei, as many American users go with Samsung, HTC, Sony, or Apple phones.  However, Huawei is a mainland China brand that is very big internationally, and it ranked third in global smartphone shipments in 2013, just ten years after its establishment.